Alia Lemkaddem1, Serge Vullimoz2, Alessandra Griffa1, Alessandro Daducci1, Margitta Seeck2, Jean-Philippe Thiran1, 3
1Ecole Polythechnique Fdral de Lausanne, Signal Processing Laboratories (LTS5), Lausanne, Switzerland; 2Epilepsy Unit, Neurology clinic, University Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine of Geneva, Switzerland; 3Department of Radiology, University Hospital and University of Lausanne, Switzerland
In this study we investigated the effect of medial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) on the global characteristics of brain connectivity estimated by topological measures. We used DSI (Diffusion Spectrum Imaging) to construct a connectivity matrix where the nodes represents the anatomical ROIs and the edges are the connections between any pair of ROIs weighted by the mean GFA/FA values. A significant difference was found between the patient group vs control group in characteristic path length(p=0.0221), clustering coefficient(p=0.02473) and small-worldness(p=0.00076). This suggests that the MTLE network is less efficient compared to the network of the control group.